Summer: A Novel

Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political FictionLonglisted for the Women's Prize for FictionNamed a Best Books of the Year by The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, NPR, New Statesman, DazedOne of New Statesmen's "best books about the Covid-19 pandemic" Praise for Summer: “Summer is a prose poem in praise of memory, forgiveness, getting the joke and seizing the moment.”­—The New York Times “Sublime. . . . Smith has completed what must be considered both one of modern fiction's most elusive and most important undertakings. . . . No novelist has come closer to describing the particular sad informed madness of our times.”  —The Boston Globe“If I was God I’d give Ali Smith The Booker every year. [Summer is] amazing.” —Val McDermid, author of Still Life “The book’s subject is still being formed by the world unfolding around us, but one thing’s for sure: Summer will be full of Smith’s characteristic empathy, wit and kindness.” —VICE, “Every new book you need to read in 2020”  “[A] clear-sighted finale to a dazzling quartet. . . . Summer is a refreshing innovation of form and content . . .” —The Guardian “A deeply resonant finale to a work that should come to be recognized as a classic. . . . A novel that is wonderfully entertaining—for its humour, allusions, deft use of time and memory, sharply realized characters, and delightfully relevant digressions—and a reminder, brought home by the pandemic, that everything and everyone truly is connected and the sufferance of suffering hurts us all.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Ali Smith concludes her seasonal quartet with the triumphant Summer, the long-awaited final installment in a groundbreaking postmodern series . . . Smith reach[es] resonant conclusions on themes carried through. . . . Now is the time to read straight through all four installments, which hang together in one grand, epic aria. Smith’s visionary series, ambitious in its scale and towering in its achievements, will be studied and imitated for decades to come.” —Esquire “A thrilling crescendo. . . . Incantatory.”  —O, The Oprah Magazine“Ali Smith’s remarkable seasonal quartet has been an essential fictional companion to the upheavals of the past four years: with Summer in July, it comes to an end. Who will hold our hand through the 2020s?” —The New Statesman “Summer is interconnected with the books that came before it, but its story—which concerns a family on the brink of change—stands strong enough to read on its own.” —Vogue“In a novel that is, like all of Smith’s, rich with references, characters quick to share stories about artists and their work, and the misfits and heroes of history, Summer is more than a perennial season. It is the bravura performance of a writer, poised at the edge of the day’s vast darkness, gathering all the warmth and light of our inner summer.” —The Washington Post “[I]f the unexpected bonus of Smith’s wise, funny, unsentimental and exhilarating work turns out to be optimism, the message for our predicament is expressed with exquisite economy.” —Financial Times “Ms. Smith has crafted something that speaks to this moment, but the impression it leaves will similarly unsettle and last.”  —The Wall Street Journal“Summer marks the culmination of this remarkable project. . . . In Summer, Smith reveals subtle but overarching connections between the four volumes' recurrent characters and themes, bringing this brilliant quartet to a satisfying close.” —NPR “[P]owerful . . .” —Los Angeles Times “[T]he final flourish of a mazy and beautiful quartet . . . both playful and profound. The Booker judges have missed an obvious trick.” —The Telegraph (UK) “Summer, like its predecessors, consistently offers breathtaking prose and engaging story lines throughout.”—LA review of books “[Smith] writes with passion and irony about current events from Brexit and the immigration crisis to the current pandemic. . . . [B]eautifully written.”—The Washington Times “[B]eautifully crafted. . . . Smith’s writing is sublime. . . . Summer is an important novel that will doubtless deliver more on every read.” —The Irish Examiner “Summer is an astonishing finale to a prescient series.” —The Irish Times “The first great coronavirus novel. . . . Summer is a book to savour, a literary tour de force that captures the nation’s psyche exquisitely and just like the season itself, ends on a fleeting, open and hopeful note, which is exactly what we need in these strange times.” —Evening Standard “A special end to a uniquely pioneering series.”—The List (UK) “This is an exuberantly rangy novel, which, like its counterpart in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, is the most charged and fervent of its peers. It runs us to the brink of the frangible present, and in so doing becomes an ode to the courage of living a life of common decency, whatever the odds.” —The Spectator “[In Summer,] it rarely feels like you’re reading a novel. Smith’s voice is conversational. . . . brisk, direct. . . . [her] methods can feel revelatory. . . . Chatty, allusive, punning, leaping between time frames and trains of thought, synthesising a vast amount of material from the past as well as the present. . . . [Smith] has found her moment.”—Prospect Magazine (UK)